Travis Cooper

Travis Warren Cooper is a Ph.D. student and associate instructor at Indiana University (Bloomington), in the departments of Religious Studies and Anthropology (doctoral major and minor emphases, respectively). His research interests include contemporary evangelicalism, Pentecostalism, revivalism, and televangelism, with excursions into theory of religion and the body, materiality, gender, media, critical ethnography, social theory, and religious experience. Travis blogs informally about his academic work here. Find out more about his research and publications here.

Posts by Travis Cooper

January 13, 2014

[Editor’s Note: This essay resides within Anderson Blanton’s “The Materiality of Prayer,” a portal into Reverberations’ unfolding compendium of resources related to the study of prayer.]

Global televangelists, with their empires of technologically progressive media, are on the forefront of changes to evangelical prayer techniques and their implementations. People often seek out healing from big names in the international revivalist circuit, healers whom they believe they have witnessed (likely from television) serving as efficacious conduits of the Holy Spirit. Itinerant healer Benedictus Toufik Hinn—known around the globe as Pastor Benny Hinn—is a vanguard figure within these developments.